


That Sounds Like Taylor Costa-Brown

by CPericardium



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/F, Family Dynamics, Gen, Laziness, Recursive Fanfiction, fic of two fics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27248068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CPericardium/pseuds/CPericardium
Summary: Taylor Costa-Brown, underachieving daughter of Chief Director of the PRT Rebecca Costa-Brown, is happy to spend her life being completely useless. Her mom is less happy.A fusion AU omake of That Sounds Like Work by Flabbyknight and Taylor Costa-Brown by Omega_93. Will update occasionally.
Relationships: Rebecca Costa-Brown | Alexandria/Fortuna | Contessa
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	1. Death and Other Clubs You Could Be Joining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Omega_93](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omega_93/gifts), [Flabbyknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flabbyknight/gifts).
  * Inspired by [That Sounds Like Work](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685185) by [Flabbyknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flabbyknight/pseuds/Flabbyknight). 
  * Inspired by [Taylor Costa-Brown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12174975) by [Omega_93](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omega_93/pseuds/Omega_93). 



  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
“Taylor,” her mother said, stepping through the doorway and over a grease-stained bag of Fugly-N-Out. Clad in her tailored dark grey business suit, she was a formidable figure, and even more formidable when she used _that_ voice. “I just got off the phone with Mr. Rodriguez.”

“That the guy who lives across our house?” Taylor held up her hands, the effect lost because she was horizontal. “I didn’t steal his lemonade stand. He wasn’t even using it.”  
  
“Your Spanish teacher, Taylor. He said you slept through his test, the lunch bell, the last bell, an earthquake, and two consecutive school shootings.”

“Huh. I _thought_ I heard a hail of gunfire punching through desks,” Taylor said, pulling up the bottom of her shirt and craning her neck to check for any stray embedded bullets. “Anyone get shot?”

“I saved everyone worth saving,” her mother said dismissively. “Don’t be too surprised if some of your teachers don’t show up next week. Back to the subject at hand: Mr. Rodriguez was very concerned about your health, so I assured him there was nothing wrong with you, _physically.”_

“Cool.”

Her mother took a hard step forward, examining Taylor with her left eye.

The right eye was concealed by a black cloth patch. She’d told Taylor it was just a particularly persistent infection, but that had been over ten years ago.

“No, not cool. Unacceptable,” her mother said. “I’ve been lax because I didn’t want to push you too hard, but I should have realised that not pushing you at all would turn you into an _invalid._ Well, I won’t be tolerating this any longer. You are to improve your grades, and you are to sign up for at least one extracurricular.”

“I have a job,” Taylor protested.

“Mooching off your hooligan friends and posting clips of yourself napping on CapeVine does not constitute a job.”

“My career has to take off someday.”

“Someday will never come, because you have no concept,” her mother said, her voice cutting. “You have no punchline. Beyond the snoring, you don’t even have music. Not to mention the fact that all you’ve done is snip a single ten-hour video into six-second segments.”

“That’s how I can afford to post content three to four times daily without any additional effort,” Taylor said. “My two point two million followers love my reliability. And my relatability. Two point two million can’t be wrong.”

“Seven billion can be wrong, Taylor.”

Her mother’s visible eye narrowed. But it was a tired narrow, a fall of the lid. She considered Taylor’s bed briefly, the cookie crumbs and ants giving her pause. Taylor dispersed the ants towards the bedposts out of courtesy, but her mother had already ensconced herself on Taylor’s swivel chair.

“When I was your age, I didn’t just lie around in bed all day,” her mother said. “I also read books, while lying around in bed all day. I was productive even in convalescence.”

“So what you’re saying is if I put _The Great Hatsby_ on my face while I sleep, you’ll get off my case.”

“Gatsby.”

“Gesundheit.”

“You have powers now, Taylor. You have the potential to do things most people can’t even imagine.”

“Yeah, but I also have the potential to do absolutely nothing.”

Her mother regarded her with restrained disapproval. “We may need to revisit the Wards talk.”

“No thanks,” Taylor said. She stretched her arms, unhinging her jaw in a loud yawn. “I’m content doin’ what I be doin’.”

“That’s what you say now,” her mother said, “but sooner or later it won’t be enough. Powers demand to be used, Taylor, and the Wards program provides a safe environment in which to use them. You’ll receive training. Resources. Responsibilities. Most importantly, you’ll be given structure.”

“But I don’t want structure, Mom. I like being an amoeba.”

“It’s a good thing then,” she said, “that I want more for you than you want for yourself. I’d consider it a personal failure if you turned to supervillainy to meet your needs, or became an ultraviolent vigilante of the night taking justice into her own uncaring hands. Or worse, a pothead.” Her mother shut her eyes as though privately arriving at a difficult conclusion, but Taylor knew that she had shaped the outcome of the conversation from the moment she’d walked into the room. “If I don’t see improvement in your attitude and your results by the end of this year, you will be joining the Wards.”

Taylor contemplated this with a growing sense of horror. “Fine. I’ll try harder.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear.” Her mother gave her a curt nod. “I expect homework to be done by dinner time.”

She’d check, too.

When the mosquitoes planted on her mother’s back reached the bottom of the staircase, Taylor heaved herself off the bed, walked over to the window and pushed it open. A lean, curly-haired boy hoisted himself from the outside ledge into her bedroom, two sweating jars of iced lemonade hooked to his belt loops.

“Is she gone?” he asked.

“I thought you could sense people’s nervous systems,” Taylor said.

“Your mom doesn’t get nervous.”

That made sense. Taylor plopped back onto her bed, waiting for Alec to detach the jars from his hips.

“Spoiler alert, this is godawful lemonade,” Alec said, unscrewing the lid of the full jar and handing it over. “There’s concentrate, and there’s vaguely citrusy cod liver oil that went through a cat first. Plus I think your neighbour was using these jars for tobacco spit.”

“Free food, don’t care.” Taylor gulped down half in one go. When she allowed herself to taste it, it was disgusting.

“Sucks to be you.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“No, I mean I heard what your mom said,” Alec said. “About you needing to work and all. Sucks.”

A squadron of beetles flew out from underneath Taylor’s bed, dragging a sweatshirt in their wake. They brought it up to her face and she wiped her lips on the sleeve.

“I guess I should get round to doing that,” she said.

They met each other’s eyes. Then they broke out into raucous laughter.  
  


* * *

**THAT SOUNDS LIKE TAYLOR COSTA-BROWN**

"Dᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴀɴᴅ Oᴛʜᴇʀ Cʟᴜʙs Yᴏᴜ Cᴏᴜʟᴅ Bᴇ Jᴏɪɴɪɴɢ"

* * *

“Yo Alec, what do you know about ‘alluvial deposits’?”

“Sounds dirty, so probably a lot,” Alec said.

They were making their way to her gym class on the other side of the school. Usually she’d skip, or forge a sick note, but she was under a microscope at the moment and couldn’t take the risk.

Back at her locker, she had thought she might as well force some studying into the already terrible walk. She’d glanced at her textbook spines and decided to start with Geography, figuring that memorising a few facts about rivers would be easier than cramming dates and writing equations. She was wrong.

“‘Alluvial deposits’,” Taylor read, “are ‘unconsolidated detrital material that are deposited during a comparatively recent geologic time by—”

“Ew,” Alec said, shuddering and covering his ears. “I told you I didn’t want to learn anything while I was here.”

Taylor slapped the textbook shut. “I know, that was exhausting just to read. I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Got a test coming up?”

“If you call a pop quiz a test.” Taylor released a mournful sigh, shoving her textbook into her backpack and her hands into her cargo pants pockets. “There are pop quizzes every other week, Alec. It’s legally torture. You have no idea what it’s like, having these nerdy randos constantly walk up to you and demand proof that you remember god-knows-what they rambled on about god-knows-how-long-ago. Isn’t it bad enough that I had to sit through it the first time?”

“Can’t relate, sorry,” Alec said. “Other families invest in education, but Dad poured all our resources into cocaine and prostitutes.”

“Didn’t you say Grue actually makes you go over plans multiple times before you carry them out?”

“Oh shit, you’re right. He _is_ a nerdy rando.” Alec chuckled. “You know the casino job? He drilled us on those floorplans for _weeks._ And I was like, bitch, I know how to rob a casino. When I play _Payday 2_ I play as a girl, so you could say I literally broke the glass ceiling for casino robbing.”

They arrived at the gym. Taylor squinted at the piece of paper taped to the door.

> _PE cancelled_
> 
> _Coach Siskind decapitated  
> _

“Sick,” Taylor said, pleased at not having to fake doing laps today. Fake laps were the worst, even worse than real ones. “He must have gotten a _head_ of himself.”

She grabbed Alec’s hand by the wrist and sloppily high-fived it.

“Tat’s not gonna be happy about this,” Alec remarked, tugging his hand out of her grasp. “She was milking that dude for PRT deets.”

“Coach Siskind was a spy? I knew it.”

“No you didn’t.”

“No I didn’t,” she conceded. “But I hoped.”

“Hey, that gives me an idea,” Alec said. “Before you have a test, just steal the answers.”

Taylor pressed a finger against her lips.

“I bet they’re super easy to find, like locked in a drawer in the teacher’s lounge. And then y—oh. Your bodyguards around?”

“Just the one today. He’s probably camouflaged right now.” Taylor cupped her mouth and hollered, “Hey Chameleon, don’t taser Alec! At least not when I’m not there to watch!”

Alec peered at their surroundings as well, watching out for hidden agents. “Thought they were just here to babysit you, not rat you out.”

“Yeah, in theory,” Taylor said. “In practice, Mom makes them report everything to her. If she finds out I even talked about cheating with you, she’ll find some way to lecture me about having integrity or something.”

“Ew.”

“I know.”

They continued down the lengthy corridor, before making a left turn out of the Physical Education wing.

“Whatever. I have two months to haul my GPA up somewhere adjacent to her stupidly unreasonable standards.” Taylor stopped at the noticeboard and let her eyes drift over the thick spread of pep rally schedules, audition sign-up sheets, and extracurricular recruitment posters. “Maybe I’ll sign up for something first. Is there like, a coma club?”

Alec shrugged. “I don’t even go here.”

To avoid having to exert her fingers, Taylor directed a small group of spiders to peel away the top layer of notices. Working methodically, they uncovered a comprehensive list of extracurricular activities pinned to the cork.

Tennis, debate, drama. Cooking, robotics, student council. Chess, band, girls’ volleyball.

All of them required so much energy and commitment. Just reading the names caused a wave of fatigue to sweep through her from head to toe.

“Alec, pick one for me,” she commanded.

“Taekwondo.”

“Very funny. Passive activities only.”

“Hmmm…” Alec dragged his middle finger down one of the columns, only to jerk it away when a spider ventured too close. “How do you feel about… Movie Club.”

Movie Club. Taylor rolled the idea around in her mind. That was just sitting around watching films every week, wasn’t it? And no one would check if she was actually paying attention to the screen.

Cosying up under a blanket in a darkened, air-conditioned lounge...

Popcorn and chocolate-coated raisins and Pepsi for days…

Only the ambient noise of whatever boring bullshit classics her peers picked out lulling her to sleep…

It would eat up her Thursday afternoons, including today, but sacrifices had to be made.  
  


* * *

  
“New girl,” a voice boomed in her ear. “New girl, wake up.”

Taylor pried her eyes open only to find everyone in the repurposed classroom looking at her expectantly. “Whuh?”

The girl who had spoken—Meredith the club president, she later learned—offered Taylor a red-lipsticked smile. Her very long face was framed by even longer dreadlocks, lending her a distinctly equine appearance. “I always like to see what the new blood bring to the table. What you choose always says so much about your personality and worldview. D’you have anything specific you’d like us to screen?”

Being aware of movies may have been an inescapable consequence of living in Los Angeles, but somehow Taylor had managed to escape it. She rummaged through her memory for what shows were currently popular enough on Betflix that her mother deigned to watch them for demographic research. “Uh… _Protectorate Pals?”_

“Basic,” said a weedy boy down the row.

“Damien, don’t gatekeep.” Meredith turned back to Taylor. “Good suggestion, but we’re more about films than animated series here. Any favourites? Anything you feel is culturally significant or aesthetically unique?”

Taylor continued to plumb her memory for the next five minutes. She eventually resurfaced with a title that sounded innocuous enough, if generic. _“All-American Hero?”_

“Yeah?” Damien snorted. “Maybe while we’re at it, we can torrent _La Fin Absolue du Monde_ or _The Intransigence of Love.”_

These allusions meant nothing to Taylor, whose knowledge of cinema was limited to billboard ads and whatever revolutionary filmic masterpieces her mother curated but almost never watched. Even so, Taylor strove to purge these prickly tidbits of trivia from her head as swiftly as possible so as not to scuff the soft and velveteen void.

The other club members must have noticed that Damien’s sarcasm was lost on her. They were summarily shunted into an awkward silence, since nobody could figure out why someone would spend five minutes staring blankly at their club president only to propose a film she knew nothing about without a trace of irony or pretension. Taylor used the time to space out.

 _“All-American Hero_ is an urban legend, Taylor.” A heavyset girl wearing glasses and a hijab finally chimed in from the back of the room, interrupting Taylor’s comfortable settle into total mental vacuity. Taylor recognised her from one of her classes, though she was hard-pressed to name which. “They say Alexandria herself acted in it, but no one knows what it’s about.”

“Alexandria’s acted in a lot of shows, Safiyah,” said the guy in front of her.

“Those are just guest appearances and fly-bys. In this film, she was the star. And no one knows why, but she did everything in her power to pull copies from every video store in the country.”

“Well,” Taylor said, “Mom has at least twenty of ‘em collecting dust upstairs.”

“How on earth did she get a hold of them?” Meredith asked. “They’re supposed to be impossible to find. Even more impossible to afford.”

“Perks of working in the PRT, maybe. I dunno, don’t really care enough to ask.”

“I don’t buy it,” Damien said, arms folded. “They’re probably like, dumb home videos where guys accidentally hit themselves in the groin with baseball bats and your mom just labelled them _All-American Hero_ for a laugh.”

Taylor decided that she also didn’t really care enough to prove anything. Street credibility, while not an alien concept, was in her estimation a futile pursuit. Everything that required regular upkeep was. While the club members bickered, she rested her head on her palms and closed her eyes.

As though deliberately choosing the prime moment to annoy her, the girl sitting by her nudged her awake. “Do you really have it, new girl?”

“Yeah,” Taylor mumbled, blinking blearily. “Can bring it if you like.”

The suddenly concrete possibility that they might actually get their hands on the film set the other club members abuzz, even if a few remained skeptical of its existence. They began speculating as to its contents, armed with half-baked forum theories and hearsay from relatives in the industry.

“I heard there’s nudity in it,” Damien said loudly, making pointed eye contact with Safiyah. “Not the tasteful kind either.”

Safiyah glared back. “Alexandria wouldn’t do porn.”

“I heard,” Damien said, “that she does it with everybody in the Triumvirate and then some. Onscreen.”

“There is no fucking porn in _All-American Hero_ ,” Safiyah snapped. “Don’t be so disrespectful.”

Meredith sighed. “New girl,” she said, “can you confirm whether there is or isn’t any adult-rated content in the movie?”

“I’ve never watched it,” Taylor said. “Mom never let me for some reason.”

Damien sniggered. “Definitely porn.”

“Can you send it to me so I can vet it before we screen it next week?” Meredith asked.

“It’s on a VHS tape,” Taylor said, prompting a few raised eyebrows. “I could mail it to you, but you’ll have to reimburse me for postage. That’ll be about twenty bucks.”

Meredith stared at her.

“No, fifty.” Taylor realised she could make a killing here. “And two popsicles.”

“Never mind. Just bring the tape next week. If there’s anything too salacious, we’ll fast-forward or turn it off. And just in case it doesn’t work out…” Meredith cast her eyes down, her smile sliding almost imperceptibly from air stewardess to strychnine victim. “Safiyah, you can bring one of your romcoms.”

The other club members in the room exploded into a cacophony of agonised groans.

“You suck, Safiyah.”

“Fall into a ditch and die.”

“You have such excruciatingly twee cinematic preferences and I find your screenings more of a chore than the pleasurable experience they are intended to be.”

“Eat my first-kiss-loving ass, you complaining shits,” Safiyah told the group, unperturbed. “If the new girl disappoints, you’ll be grateful that I always have _Sleepless in Sea-Cattle_ on hand.”

Taylor was just glad when it was time to go home.  
  


* * *

  
Taylor lay sprawled out on the sofa, her head on a cushion, a phone cradled under her chin. Someone was on the other line—her father, judging by the sound of his hesitant voice asking her if she was busy and if he should hang up. Taylor had lost the thread of conversation twenty minutes ago, if she’d even had it in the first place.

Luckily for her, her father was a simple man with simple passions, and he tended to circle back to the few mundane subjects that ruled his waking moments. She guessed from context clues that the current topic was his pipe dream of rebuilding the Brockton Bay ferry.

“Follow your dreams, Dad. I believe in you,” she said, encouragingly. “Ferry godmothers are real. Faith, trust, and engine rust.”

_“What?”_

“What?”

His voice cracked. _“Taylor, I just need to know whether you’ll make it to the funeral.”_

“Oh, sure. Send me a card or something.”

The telephone base was too far away, so she just set the handset on the floor.

A warm, savoury aroma wafted out from the kitchen across the living room. Taylor glanced over her shoulder and saw her mother working industriously to turn a saucepan of potatoes into a mash. A pot of the oxtail stew left over from yesterday sat simmering on the stove.

“Whoa, you’re actually home.”

Her mother didn’t look up from her mashing, which she was doing with a gloved fist. “And what exactly are you implying by that note of surprise?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you perhaps implying,” her mother said, “that you are a latchkey child who typically spends her days languishing in the absence of a maternal role model, and that my appearance at dinnertime is a rare occurrence?”

“Your words, not mine,” Taylor said gamely. “I’m guessing the office wasn’t too busy today.”

“It’s always busy.” Her mother snapped off her glove for emphasis. “I simply felt it necessary to check up on you, and reprioritised.”

As her mother set the table, Taylor slouched over to better assess her mood. She despised getting up, but her mother wouldn’t take too kindly to her planting bugs on the bare skin of her face without a good reason.

Her mother never looked tired or stressed out despite seeming to work all hours of every single day. Her hair stayed shiny and silky, and she didn’t get zits or wrinkles, and her physique stayed athletic slim beneath her tailored business suits. Even now, after over forty straight hours managing crisis after crisis, the expression on her face was stern and focused.

There was only a glimmer of something else there, and Taylor knew she was the only one who could see it, because it was both caused by and designed for her.

Taylor sensed that her mother sometimes felt sparks of guilt for not being around, for not being that perfect loving mom dreamed up by the parenting manuals, there to hold Taylor’s hand and experience every childhood and adolescent milestone with her. It was probably this guilt that resulted in her popping in and out of the house just to say hello to her daughter, crafting the illusion she had been around all day and that _Taylor_ was the one to blame for not reaching out. She never descended to the ineffectual fluttering and fussing that Taylor observed other parents doing, but she wasn’t immune to bursts of affection intended to make up for some perceived lost time. Such moments were intense yet strangely remote—an unexpected gift, a stolen fond glance, a hand poised to smooth Taylor’s unruly curls.

This dinner was not one of those moments. This was a tactical check-in. Chameleon must have squealed. “This is about me cheating, isn’t it?”

Her mother looked up and fixed her with a deceptively calm stare, the kind that levelled subordinates to the ground. “That depends. _Have_ you been cheating, Taylor?”

“Nope. My friend brought it up and I soundly rebuffed him, as is right and honest.” Taylor was not a subordinate. Spiders climbed the table’s legs, bearing a spindle of silk thread with which to lasso her fork and spoon. “Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. I have way too many morals, yada yada, integrity.”

“Spiders off the table,” her mother said, sharp.

 _Damn it._ Taylor had hoped she wouldn’t notice. The spiders relinquished her utensils and scuttled off.

“Roaches too.”

The cockroaches hiding beneath the corners of her placemat crawled out.

_“Taylor.”_

The houseflies stationed on the rim of her water glass deserted their posts. Her mother could be so squeamish. Taylor accommodated her desire for bug-free meals, but it seriously put a damper on her ability to eat without using her hands. The aversion may have stemmed from Taylor’s last birthday party, during which Taylor accidentally bit the head off a beetle in front of all the guests.

 _In my defense,_ she’d said, _they’re very similar to macarons._

 _That doesn’t explain why you ate five_ , Mom had argued.

Today, she wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. She mumbled grace without complaint although neither of them was religious—her mother believed less in God than she did in the performance of rituals that appeased her own parents, even when they weren’t around. Taylor waited for her to remove the lids of the steaming pots. Then, sadly bereft of external eight-legged aid, she helped herself to the creamy mashed potatoes and scooped free-floating hunks of rich and gelatinous oxtail meat onto her plate. Her mother could have the joints.

“I’ve arranged for your Uncle Kurt and Aunt Contessa to visit,” her mother said, looking none too pleased at Taylor’s table manners but refraining from commentary. She served herself in a more measured fashion. “Please clear your schedule for next weekend.”

“Mmf. Done.” Taylor shovelled a spoonful of mashed potatoes into her maw. Gravy splattered the tabletop.

“How was school today?”

 _Tedious like this conversation_ , Taylor thought, swallowing her mouthful. “Wasn’t bad. No school shootings that I was aware of. Gym teacher lost his head. Oh yeah, and I joined the Movie Club. We haven’t watched anything yet though.”

“That…” Her mother paused. “… isn’t what I had in mind when I asked you to take up an afterschool activity. But I suppose it’s a start.”

“Anything to not be drafted into kiddie cape camp,” Taylor said.

Her mother suddenly became quiet, and not just because she was eating. “I do of course expect you to write an essay on every movie you watch,” she said.

Taylor’s eyes swivelled up to meet her mother’s inscrutable gaze. “What?”

“With academic rigour commensurate to your grade level,” her mother added wryly, “so no first grade book reports, please.”

Taylor choked on an uneasy laugh. “No way. Extra homework wasn’t part of the deal.”

Her mother ignored her, gaily shredding a chunk of meat into bite-size slivers with her fork. “Two thousand words minimum, eleven point TNR, one inch margin, double-spaced, paginated. You may use MLA or Chicago for citations—I’m not picky. You may not use some unholy blend of the two, however. This will be graded.”

“I have no idea what any of those words mean. Especially the ones that are just letters. Mom, you can’t do this.”

“Really? Because it looks like I just did.”

“Mom. I can’t write two thousand words a week on top of all my other work, and hobbies, and, and—what even is there to say about movies? You’re not supposed to write about them. That’s why they don’t have words. They’re not literature.”

“Oh,” her mother said casually, “would you prefer to write about literature? I can be flexible.”

With that, her mother speared the last oxtail joint with precision and dropped it onto her own mound of mashed potatoes. Taylor watched her chew. For the first time in her life she felt her heart stir inside her chest, like an undersea mollusc awakening sluggishly from slumber.

Upstairs in the spare study, bugs were already hunting down a dusty VHS tape.


	2. For Those Who Taught You to Fear the Censor

The members of the Movie Club gathered in front of the television, most of them bored and bewildered to the point of distraction.

Onscreen, an obscenely obese manatee swallowed another diver. It was more accurate to describe him as half-man, half-manatee, since he had been found by scientists to be fully sapient as well as possessed of numerous highly marketable humanoid features. Pre-gorging, he was sixty percent abs by volume, and his only claim to being part sea cow was perpetually clammy grey skin and early-CGI flippers for arms. 

“How is this a romcom?” asked a guy in a trucker cap named Asher. He made no attempt to keep his volume down. “There is neither romance nor comedy in it. There is only suicide.”

“It’s not suicide to risk everything for what truly matters,” Safiyah hissed. “Screw you, haters. _Sleepless in Sea-Cattle_ is iconic. Taylor, you appreciate it, right?”

She elbowed Taylor, whose eyes opened in time to catch the protagonist nuzzling the manatee’s moist snout as he poked his head out of the water.

“Gimme a recap,” Taylor said, her eyes drooping closed again. “Plot’s kind of hard to follow.”

“The marine biologist’s abusive husband got swallowed by the manatee-man,” Safiyah explained. “So they keep sending divers to rescue him, but only she knows how to communicate with the manatee-man through her heart’s song. The touching tale of a love that transcends language and physical barriers.”

“I got that,” Asher said. “But like, why did she flood her whole entire house so that she could consummate with Manatee Dude in front of her husband? I just think that was really insensitive to those of us who put a lot of effort not only into not being cuckolded by genetically improbable aquatic mammals, but also into drywall maintenance.”

“So done with this.” Damien crawled over to the remote. He snatched it up and turned off the television set, to furious booing from Safiyah and sighs of relief from everyone else. “Y’all talk way too much during movies. It’s annoying.”

“Well, what do you want to do then?” Safiyah retorted.

“Fuck it, let’s watch _All-American Hero_ ,” he said. He jerked his head towards Taylor, now dozing on a beanbag while the VHS tape lay at her feet. “I don’t even know why we waited this long when the new girl ponied up.”

The club members murmured amongst themselves. They’d held off for a reason.

“Are you sure we should?” Safiyah asked doubtfully, on the others’ behalf. “I mean, what if it’s a cursed film?” 

“We’ve watched cursed films before and nothing happened,” someone said.

“Remember how the Slaughterhouse Nine visited my dreams after we saw _The Ninth House on the Left?_ And then my parakeet had a stroke?” 

“That time was because you said ‘Jack Slash’ in the mirror three times at midnight. It had nothing to do with the movie.”

“Everybody, please stop,” Meredith said, and they stopped. “Fear not, for it isn’t cursed. I watched the first scene before you came in, and I can confirm that it’s nothing but a cheesy cape flick. A classic Saturday morning cartoon, but live-action.”

“Then why was it recalled?”

“Who knows what set off the prudes in the ‘90s? Let’s all just have a good laugh.”

That seemed to settle things. Meredith got up and inserted the tape into the old VHS player. Damien reached for the remote, accidentally jostling a freshman sitting close by. “Sorr—wait, who even are you?” 

The girl stared back owlishly, her hand taking unceasing dictation in a notebook. Her other hand moved to tug Taylor’s shirt, gently at first, then violently. Taylor cracked an eye open.

“Ignore her. She’s just transcribing everything you’re saying,” Taylor said, sinking deeper into the beanbag. She gestured languidly at the screen. “Just carry on talking the way you do.”

 _All-American Hero_ began to play.

* * *

 **THAT SOUNDS LIKE TAYLOR COSTA-BROWN**  
  
Fᴏʀ Tʜᴏsᴇ Wʜᴏ Tᴀᴜɢʜᴛ Yᴏᴜ ᴛᴏ Fᴇᴀʀ ᴛʜᴇ Cᴇɴsᴏʀ

* * *

The floor, the walls, the ceiling—everything was on the verge of collapse, if not collapsing already. But the four greatest superheroes in the world did not falter in the face of such trivialities. The only person who could truly be hurt was their tinker, but he did not falter either, because he lacked any sense of self-preservation. Many have theorised that that was his real superpower, for it allowed him to work under all stressful conditions up to and including imploding supervillain lairs.

“Give it up!” Legend shouted, bracing the crumbling ceiling above Hero. “Your henchmen can’t reach you from the bottom of the piranha tank, and Hero has disabled all your contingencies. We’ve foiled your evil plan. You’re done in this town, Lieutenant Lizard!”

 _“I’ve been promoted. It’s Captain Lizard now,”_ the supervillain said, his voice a sibilant rasp. A moment later, his smirk curdled into a grimace. _“No, never mind. I dislike how it doesn’t alliterate.”_

Recently lasered glass lay in perfectly circular pieces around the control booth. Hero was wedged in a corner, sweating, furiously rewiring circuits and flipping dials and mashing buttons in sequence. Every now and then, he would consult a chart covered in technical arcana, derive some meaning from the scribbles, and go back to hacking into the reactor’s mainframe.

Eidolon just sort of hovered around awkwardly, unsure of what to do with his molten plasma hands or why this specific power had even kicked in, but not quite ready to extinguish them. His mask glowed with the intensity of a strip of LED lights that had been painstakingly hidden along the borders.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Legend said. “Come quietly and we’ll help you make things right with your estranged son!”

_“The only way things can be made right is if the world is recreated in my image.”_

The villain tried to make his getaway, crawling towards the exit on his elbows and knees with his gear strapped to his back.

But someone was waiting in the doorway. Alexandria towered over him, mirroring his fast-fading smirk. She gripped him by the throat and lifted him up like he weighed nothing, then strode forward and ground him into the nearest pillar. The obsidian cracked upon contact, and he groaned both in pain and at the crunch of his gear. “ETA, Hero?”

Hero popped his head out from under the control panel indignantly. “I haven’t even betrayed you yet!”

“How long until the reactor is disabled.”

“Oh. Four seconds.”

 _“Foolish heroes,”_ the villain choked out between struggling. A wide smile stretched his reptilian face, fanged and gloating. _“You know not what hell you have unleashed.”_

Alexandria had time to raise an eyebrow before the reactor blew up, sending her and her three teammates flying in opposite directions. The world was enveloped in blinding light.

* * *

Alexandria cut a crisp figure on the edge of the cliff, like a black gnomon pitched upward against the eternal sun. She was perfectly motionless except for her cape rippling in the breeze. From the back she looked like she was gazing at the horizon, but the observant viewer would notice that her head was tilted slightly downwards. The omniscient viewer would know that her eyes were closed in troubled meditation. 

“You’ve been out here for a while,” came a voice from the jungle behind her.

It was Eidolon, returning from another hunt just in time for sunset—rather, a parody of sunset followed by a parody of dusk, crafted by someone who had only read about times of day in picture books. The sun never went down and the moon might as well have been cut out of crepe paper for all it illuminated. Once a day, a false night descended from the canopy, blanketing the underbrush in roiling darkness.

It became impossible to find food and shelter then, and even the great crepuscular and nocturnal beasts that roamed the land had trouble catching prey unless they happened to possess enhanced senses or that specific retinal adaptation to low light. Most of them tended to have adaptations like ‘pores that secrete acidic slime’ and ‘lamprey-like vortex of needle-sharp fangs’ and ‘seeds that impregnate you when you eat them’. Legend had a rather protracted and distressing run-in with the last one, but by lucky happenstance Hero had discovered that a mutant porcupine quill made a good coat hanger in a pinch.

The pickings were slim as usual. Eidolon held out a branch, offering up three pitiful slivers of cooked snail flesh on charred bark. At least the snails were normal, if one didn’t inspect the antennae too closely.

“As the smart one of this team, I’ve come to a decision,” Alexandria said. She opened her eyes but did not look at him or take a dicksnail. “We’re going to eat Hero.”

Eidolon was silent. Their two teammates emerged from the thicket, absorbed in conversation. 

“It’s an idea in progress,” she said quietly. “Don’t tell him yet. I want to broach it with the others first.”

Eidolon pivoted to face Hero and activated a voice amplification power. _“Hero!”_

“What?” he yelled back.

“Alexandria says she wants to eat you!”

“Eidolon,” Alexandria said. 

“Keeping secrets is hard,” he grunted.

“Whoa there, Lexy,” Hero said, approaching them. “You know I love you, but I don’t ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■. And no offense, Eids, but you’re not my type.” 

“What is your type?” Legend asked. “Just wondering.”

Hero mulled over the question.

“Hot,” he said finally.

“Please don’t improvise,” Legend said.

“They’re professionals, they’ll edit it out. Anyway, my type is straight female women.” Hero flashed the viewer a wink and a rakishly handsome grin, before turning back to Alexandria. “What were you saying about my butt?”

“Now is not the time for farcical misunderstandings,” Alexandria said. “Let me rephrase: we’re Donner Partying it up in this district.”

Legend made a skeptical noise. “Sounds like a last resort.”

“Now is the time for last resorts. Think about it logically. Nobody knows where we are, least of all us. There is an impenetrable dome over our heads, preventing us from simply flying away. We’ve been stranded here with rapidly diminishing abilities for an unknown period of time, subsisting mainly on stoat and turtle eggs.” 

Hero laughed. “Silly Lexy,” he said. “Stoats don’t lay eggs.”

“This just isn’t a sustainable situation,” Alexandria went on. “Look at us. If Eidolon weren’t using the vestiges of his power to project the illusion of a six-pack, we would be able to see his ribs.”

“It’s a myth that I do that,” Eidolon said, turning to the camera.

“We’re wasting away in the expectation that someone is coming for us. It’s time we face the facts. _No one_ is coming for us, and even if they are, we may not be alive to take advantage of it. But if we do this the intelligent way, make a sacrifice in exchange for survival and rationing out our supplies, we buy ourselves time to figure a way out of this mess. This is the utilitarian solution. I may be a hero like you, but I am also willing to be something of an anti-hero making the difficult choices you aren’t willing to even consider.”

“But why me?” Hero asked. “Eids still has more calories. We’ll probably all get mad cow, though.”

“Alexandria, the smart one of the team, has a point,” Eidolon said. “The rest of us are still mostly invulnerable to physical trauma. With you, all we’d have to do is crack open that armoured shell like an oyster and scoop all the good meat out.”

Hero folded his arms. “Implying I have bad meat?”

“Getting worse every second.”

“You have all officially gotten on my last nerve,” Alexandria said. She glanced to her right and lowered her visor. “Except you, Legend. You’re grandfathered in.”

“What did I do,” Legend said.

“No, no, I’m with you,” Eidolon said gruffly, laying an arm across Hero’s shoulder. “Look, Hero, you’re the heart of the team.” 

“Aw. Thanks, man.”

“Is it so hard to also be the liver, kidney, breast, tongue, ribs, haunches, eyeballs, brain, and large intestine?”

Hero wrested Eidolon’s arm off of him. “You’re going to eat my _tongue?_ Gross.”

“Not too thrilled about it either, but waste not, want not.”

Legend interposed himself between them. “Guys, this is madness. I know we’re desperate. I know we’re hungry. I know the odds are high that we’ll die out here. But we’ve been through so much and come out all the stronger for it. And most importantly, we’ve come out of it together. Are we seriously considering discarding all our morals and our friendship just so we can have a few substantial meals?”

“Yes,” Alexandria said.

“That was my impression as well,” David said.

Hero shrugged. “Guess that’s where things are at.”

Legend sputtered. “Well—we shouldn’t be!”  
  
“Ledge, the real question is why are you horning in on my role as heart of the team?” Hero shook his head. “Isn’t it enough that you’re already the eye candy of the team?”

“That is actually also me,” Alexandria said in a voice that brooked no debate. “Legend is the token buzzkill.”

“Checks out.”

Legend’s mouth flattened into a line. “Why are you so okay with having your body desecrated?”

“Because that’s just a typical Tuesday night in my household, hey-o,” Hero said, cocking fingerguns. “But I’m not like, actually okay with it.”

Alexandria focused all her attention on him, softening. “Aren’t you? You seem calm about it.”

“I don’t have to be okay with things to do them, especially if they’re the right thing. And I know it’s the right thing to help you guys get home,” he said. “Limbs can be regrown and organs can be replaced, but there’s no substitute for my best friends.”

One good thing that came out of the power loss was that Alexandria could hug Hero as tightly as she wanted without crushing his spine. Legend’s too, now that he was here. Eidolon just sort of stood around awkwardly, staring at his hands and willing them to become plasma again so that he would have an excuse not to join in. They dragged him into the fray anyway.

Alexandria released Hero and took a step back. “We’ll explore other avenues, but—”

Then a giant two-headed jaguar leapt out of the bushes, seized Hero in its jaws, and bounded off into the jungle. 

* * *

  
  
A campfire blazed in the middle of the clearing. Flames distorted the surrounding air as they rose, curling, into the artificial night sky. The three teammates sat around the fire, with dinged-up armour and artfully arranged scratches and smears on their faces that didn’t actually besmirch their features at all. Alexandria sat on a log considerably further away from the fire, facing the forest.

Legend was the first to speak. “I already miss him. So much.”

“I’m just sad we could have been eating mutant jaguar this whole time,” Eidolon said. With a greasy skewer, he prodded the slices of medium-rare flesh he’d spread over a branch. “Instead we’re stuck with this stringy bull■ ■ ■ ■ .”

“Sometimes I think I’m the only one who even tries to stay on-script,” Legend said, earning an offended look from Alexandria. 

“They’ll edit it out.” Eidolon coughed a few times into his fist, and when he spoke again his voice had fallen a few octaves. “We could have saved him. If we’d only moved faster…”

“There was no way, in our weakened state,” Legend said. “We couldn’t have matched its speed, and with how powerful its jaws were, it wasn’t safe to extract him.”

“But how can we call ourselves heroes, if we can’t even protect one of our own?” 

Eidolon’s stoic front cracked at the word ‘protect’. He hunched over, his shoulders heaving a little as he not-so-covertly smacked the back of an upside-down ketchup bottle to get the sauce out. A thick red gob of it oozed onto his branch. 

Legend stared at it. His eyes narrowed. But he swallowed whatever he was going to say, and gingerly reached over to pat his teammate’s back. “Maybe giving up your life for the greater good is part of being a true hero. We can only make the best of tragedy.”

“I’m so sorry, Hero,” Alexandria whispered to her kebab. She twirled it slowly, a single tear trailing down her cheek. “I’ll never be able to forget you.”

And the black closed in.  
  


♩♪♫♬  
  
  
 _WE STARTED SINGIN’ BYE, BYE MISTER AMERICAN PIE / DROVE MY CHEVY TO THE LEVEE BUT THE LEVEE WAS DRY_ , the speakers blared over the credits.

Meredith turned the television off, plunging the classroom into darkness. She set the remote on the floor and after a thought, nudged it further away with her foot before drawing her leg back tight against her chest. 

“You told us,” Safiyah said, “that it wasn’t cursed.”

There was no response from the president or the other club members, only soft snoring from a bean bag.

* * *

  
  
Around noon that Saturday, Taylor wandered downstairs to find her mother feeding her essay into a shredder at the dining table.

“Morning, Mom,” she said, but her mother must not have heard her over the noise.  
  
Bugs went about opening cabinets and fetching her sustenance. Her mother had destroyed her elaborate silk system for getting herself breakfast after one too many clutches of spider eggs (and more than one spider) got scrambled along with the regular eggs, so she made do with cereal.

A team of praying mantises spread out over the rim, readied their scythes and started picking all the marshmallows out into a separate bowl. 

The whirring petered out. Her mother didn’t move, but she was looked at Taylor expectantly, her hand resting on top of the machine.

“You know, I worked moderately hard on that,” Taylor said, muffled by the marshmallows. “Not very hard? But moderately.”

“Taylor, your bibliography was two lines long.”

“Cite shit, get crit.”

“To your credit, your analysis wasn’t complete gibberish,” her mother said, flicking at the plastic container of essay confetti. “Only mostly. But I found it difficult to believe that you consulted little to no relevant literature while writing your more coherent expository paragraphs. So I ran the paper through plagiarism detection software.” 

“Man, they’re making those programs bulky these days.” Taylor nodded at the shredder. 

“Imagine my lack of surprise,” her mother said, “when it revealed that over a third of the text was copy-pasted wholesale from unsourced PHO Wiki articles. You even failed to remove the banner begging for donations.”

“That was left in on purpose.” 

Her mother slowly canted forward on her elbows. Her hard eyes locked onto Taylor’s. “Was the comments section debating whether Hero with prep time would beat bloodlusted Alexandria in a sealed room ‘left in on purpose’?”

“Okay… I’m picking up on some rancid vibes?” Taylor fried her voice to imitate her mother’s Valley Girl drawl. “At least the rest was like, original? Credit where credit’s due?”

“I can distinguish between your writing style and that of a freshman you snatched at random from a hallway and bribed with a free smoothie coupon.”

“What?” Taylor cursed in her regular New England accent. “But I copied exactly what she wrote with my own two hands!”

There was a long silence as her mother sat down and poured herself another cup of looseleaf oolong tea from a clear teapot.

“And it was a smoothie coupon _book,”_ Taylor said. She shrugged a shoulder. “That I got someone else to make.”

“Taylor, the point of this assignment was not to evaluate how well you could execute a pyramid scheme.”

“Well, duh. You already know the answer is ‘flawlessly’.”

The light furrow of her mother’s brow meant that Taylor was going to get it one way or another. The ultimatum loomed large. 

“Next essay will be better,” Taylor promised. “I guess. Maybe. Probably not.”

“Hardly matters now. I’m cancelling the assignment.” Her mother sipped her tea. “The Movie Club disbanded.”

Taylor processed this, and was surprised to find herself disappointed. Not very disappointed, but moderately. “Huh. Why?”   
  
  


* * *

  
  
Rebecca swung open the door to the principal’s office, ignoring the protests of the harried secretary outside.

“Ms. Costa-Brown, I didn’t expect to see you back so soon,” Principal Walsh said, standing up behind her desk. “On a Saturday.”

“I’m a busy woman, Mrs. Walsh. I believe I’ve made that abundantly clear.” Rebecca walked up and pulled a seat for herself. “I don’t enjoy coming down here for anything less than an emergency.”

“What emergency brings you here this morning?”

“My daughter recently joined the Movie Club,” Rebecca said. 

“I saw,” Principal Walsh said, “and then I changed my prescription, because clearly my eyes were deceiving me.”

She smiled, but Rebecca did not. Rebecca read her within blinks: curiosity, uncertainty, residual torpor from breakfast, a flash of confused attraction (understandable), slight nervousness at interacting with a parent that was intentionally being pushed aside. No awe. No fear, none specific to Rebecca. Usually that absence brought her a measure of comfort, that people still saw her as human and respected her regardless of her position.

Now it just irritated her, because it was in the way.

“She seems to be quite happy in it.”

“You seem to be mistaking comfort for happiness,” Rebecca said. “Taylor could be happy in a landfill if provided a pillow.”  
  
 _“You_ seem unhappy,” the principal observed. “Why?”

Rebecca reached into her handbag, and took out the DVD case she had picked up from the classroom where the Movie Club convened. She pointed at the glossy red sticker on the corner of the cover. The one with the big, bold ‘R’.

“I see… well, _Sleepless in Sea-Cattle_ is iconic. When I was a little girl and my parents were throwing the dishes again, I’d race my twin brother to Granny’s trailer, and we would watch it on repeat all night long.” Principal Walsh adjusted her spectacles, and behind them, her pale green eyes took on a wistful gleam. “I later found out he was deliberately letting the dog out and telling Mum and Da that the other did it, just so they would fight and we could be blessed with these moments. Extraordinary.” 

“Your nostalgia for domestic violence and childhood psychopathy is moving, but immaterial.” She was bitterly conscious of the irony. For all her undisguised disdain for sentimentality, she had only kept those tapes because they had Hero’s voice and visage on them. “My daughter is only sixteen, and she is not the youngest member of the Movie Club.”

“I see,” the principal said again, and nothing else. 

“What is the obstacle here?” 

The principal hemmed and hawed for a bit, then admitted, “I just don’t think it would be fair to deprive these kids of the same escape. Even if it does stray a ways away from the law.”

“I’m afraid it’s not up to you to decide.”

“Ms. Costa-Brown, they’re teenagers.” The principal gave her a patronising smile. “There’s no need to nanny them. Surely there were shows your parents let you watch when you were a child that contained scenes a teensy bit more graphic than they should’ve been. Perhaps even now, there are things you feel you shouldn’t be watching but watch anyway.” She winked.

 _What is this woman going on about_ , Rebecca wondered. _And where the hell does she get off winking at me._

It wasn’t that she completely disagreed. There were few good reasons to censor fiction; censorship should be reserved for the truth. People like herself and Doctor Mother and Contessa could have information. Other people needed stories. But what did one do when the lines were blurred? The premise of having to cannibalise a roadkill teammate had seemed like peak drama in 1994—now, given what had happened before they could salvage his body… it was in such poor taste. 

The important thing was to not act any differently. To give Taylor no clue that reading the title of the essay—kudos to her for remembering to include one—had been like a slap in the face. Rebecca had not felt a slap in the face since she was about thirteen, but she imagined it hurt at least as much having that entire film flit through her mind from opening credits to ending in the space of seconds.

Her own fault, for springing the assignment on Taylor on such short notice while not thinking to secret the tapes away somewhere more secure in the meantime.  
  
It was fortunate that Taylor was the way she was, because Rebecca doubted she had paid a whit of attention to the contents of her selection. She would go over the rest of the essay later with a red pen and only provide general feedback. There were opportunities to teach her daughter about proper analysis, about critical dissection of audiovisual elements and semiotics and themes and narrative structure. But this was not the film for that. 

It also wasn’t the time to go poking at ancient aches from ancient history, especially that which she and the others had all firmly and unequivocally agreed had been outside their control. “The reason I am bringing this up at all is to call your attention to the wildly inappropriate material that your students have access to, so that we may work together to prevent it from causing legal issues. Moral issues as well, but you don’t seem to care as much about that.”

Principal Walsh’s eyebrows rose. “Legal issues?”

“Are you aware,” Rebecca asked, “which film your students screened last Thursday?” 

“ _All-American Hero?_ Why, yes, I did sit in. Shame I missed the first half, but it was… unique enough that I asked the club to host additional screenings for all interested students.” Principal Walsh leaned back and steepled her hands thoughtfully. “I found the actress who played Alexandria very s—” 

* * *

  
  
Her mother refilled her cup. “We can only speculate as to the reasons behind its demise. But a society like that, founded on rotten tomatoes and unearned elitism? It was bound to buckle beneath its own facade eventually.”  
  
“The club president said it was like, fifty years old,” Taylor said. “Almost as old as the school.”

“Of course she appealed to legacy,” her mother said. “Elitists always do. These in-groups function only as a space for a self-chosen elect to smugly congratulate each other on their sophisticated taste in media, which just so happens to comprise nothing but identically bland, identically tawdry attempts at catering to the washed-up curmudgeons of the industry who lost their ability to discern paella from porridge decades ago. As though critical acclaim is any reliable indicator of quality. The _Maggie Holt_ movies are never going to be considered prestige cinema, never not going to be snubbed at every awards show, and yet they have some of the most riveting writing and direction in film history. Does any so-called Schmoovie Club ever screen _The Last Burden of the Goblin Queen_? No. That would challenge their fragile sense of identity among their bougie peers, their only anchor in an increasingly entropic world. Somehow, a good clean fantasy adventure with a dash of intrigue has no place in this cold, dark sea of biographical melodramas and romantic historical epics.” 

Taylor paused in her marshmallow-devouring. Something was off. “Mom,” she said, “did you murder the Movie Club?”

Instead of answering, her mother spent the next few minutes slowly but noisily drinking the rest of her tea, before getting up to rinse her cup at the kitchen sink.

Taylor shrugged it off. As long as she didn’t have to write any more essays, everything was just dandy. She was about to get up and head upstairs to take a nap, when a few of her roaming flies brushed against something unexpected in the living room. 

A bespectacled blonde man wearing only a light blue dress shirt with a pocket protector was standing by the sofa. She both didn’t understand and completely understood why she hadn’t noticed him before—he was in plain sight, yet obligingly invisible, like a fellow elevator passenger. Unlike a fellow elevator passenger, he didn’t flinch at the insects converging on his body. 

Master/Stranger protocols would come in handy right about now. If only she remembered them. 

_Oh well. Maybe Mom does._ “How long has that guy been here?” Taylor asked.

“Long enough,” the man said, without skipping a beat or even looking at her through the cloud of bugs orbiting his head. “I was just admiring your DVD collection, Rebecca.” He held up the copy of Sleepless in Sea-Cattle that had been resting on the coffee table. “Now this is iconic.”

Her mother didn’t acknowledge him at all, instead sweeping across the kitchen to grab the box of cereal off the counter. She brandished the packet at Taylor’s face. 

“The point of the essay assignment,” she said, “was to help you understand that not everything will just fall into your lap. You are supposed to endure the stale sawdust flavour of the wheat flakes, suffer the inevitable agony of their jagged edges raking down your throat. Only then may you be rewarded with the sweet rubbery victory of marshmallow. But even then, not always.” She crushed the packet in her fist. “In life the ratio of cereal to marshmallows is woefully unbalanced.”

A pair of beetles picked up a marshmallow that had fallen into Taylor’s lap and flew it up to her open mouth. “You know you’re supposed to chew food before swallowing it, right?” she said, demonstrating just that. “And you can put milk in it.”

“Milk is but a distraction, from both the pain and my metaphor,” her mother said. “We were going to do something fun today, but I changed my mind.” 

She set the packet of cereal aside, and the man approached the kitchen.

“It’s nice to see you again, Taylor,” he said, walking up to her and extending a hand. “The last time we met, you were barely up to my knee.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Uncle Kurt is here to teach you the value of hard work. He is the foremost freelance banker in the world, as well as a longtime colleague whom I hold in fairly high esteem,” her mother said. “And Aunt Contessa is here, too.”

As though summoned, a white rectangle opened up next to the refrigerator and a dark-haired, fair-skinned woman in full suit and tie appeared in it. She tossed her fedora into the air as she emerged, and it landed neatly on one of the ears of Taylor’s chair. 

Taylor only had vague memories of this woman’s infrequent visits throughout her life, and it seemed Aunt Contessa deemed her just as forgettable; she spared Taylor the briefest of glances before walking up to stare intently at her mother’s cheekbone. Something about the utter blankness of her expression paired with the unwavering gaze conjured in Taylor’s mind a person who thought purely in punctuation. Taylor could almost visualise the bubble-font question mark suspended over Aunt Contessa's head. 

Her mother took a single step to the side, away from her.

Taylor waited a few seconds before she devolved into pleading. “Can I please use the portals too? Please, please, please, please, please, please lease, please, please, please, please? Please, please, please, please, please, please. _Pleeeeeeeaase,_ please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, _pleeeease._ Please, please, please, please, please, please please, please, please, please, please, please? Please, please, please, please, please, please?” 

“No,” her mother said. 

Taylor unclasped her hands, pouting.

Uncle Kurt’s own hand returned to his side untouched. He looked at the fedora hanging from the chair. “Will you not be joining us? I was under the impression that this was a family bonding activity.”

“Contessa and I have important affairs of state to attend to,” her mother said. 

“Ah. Well. Things do come up.” Uncle Kurt cleared his throat and nodded stiffly at Taylor. “I look forward to showing you what I know.”

_Wait. Banking… money… numbers…_

“Math?” Taylor recoiled, shaking her head. “No, no math. My doctor forbade it. You can’t make me think.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Uncle Kurt said. “That would go against the Constitution your own mother swore to protect. We’re merely embarking on a little excursion.”

“Do you need a grenade launcher?” her mother asked, casting a judgemental eye over his person. “I have spare AT-4s in the garage.”

“I brought my own. Door, artillery.” A small white rectangle opened up behind him at shoulder-height. “As for you, Taylor…” 

He reached through the portal to retrieve an assault rifle. He presented it to Taylor, but before she could take it her mother stepped in between them. Her hand fell firmly over the muzzle of the rifle and lowered it.

“Taylor has not been trained in gun safety and marksmanship, nor can she be trusted with firearms at all.”

Uncle Kurt started, “I’m certain I can—” 

“A gentle reminder that over the years I have made a keen study of ligaments, with special focus on the variety of exceedingly painful ways to separate them from the articular extremities of bones. The knowledge is theoretical now, but if anything were to happen to my daughter, I would be forced to find practical applications.”

Uncle Kurt pushed the rifle back through the portal. “Duly noted,” he said, and turned to Taylor. “We’ll be stopping by a few rainforests to pick up your spiders and wasps and whatnot. The rest is a surprise, but pack heavy and venomous.”

Taylor’s brain—which by some medical miracle happened to be all hind—lit up and guttered a little at the easy opportunity to expand her army of tiny serfs. She could feel the buzzing beyond the door. “Can I get crabs?”

“If you foresee needing them,” Uncle Kurt said, “then I don’t see why not.”

He walked through the portal and motioned for her to join him. As she passed over the threshold, she heard a noise and felt vibrations ripple through some of the termites she’d left behind. She turned her head. 

Behind her, her mother had slammed her aunt against the far display cabinet hard enough to rattle picture frames. She tightened a now flushed Aunt Contessa’s torn-off tie around her wrists, before spinning her around and backhanding her onto the coffee table.

Despite not looking very injured, Aunt Contessa didn’t rise, only gazing up at her mother with hooded eyes and slightly parted lips. A blinking mental exclamation point dissolved into ellipses, soon to start trailing off into a tilde. Her mother stalked over and gripped her thighs.

“Oh no,” Taylor said, looking back and forth between the living room and the world outside the portal. The full weight of her punishment finally crystallised, dropping on her like an anvil. “Oh god, oh fuck.” 

Uncle Kurt glanced at her quizzically.

Taylor fell to her knees and flung her head back in despair. “I have to go _outside?”  
  
  
_

* * *

  
[All-American Hero](https://youtu.be/Z3iSLltyLKo)


End file.
